EUROPE

New Violence Belies Talk of Peace in Ukraine

By 
President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine knelt at a ceremony in Kiev on Sunday commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the former pro-Russian government. With him were President Joachim Gauck of Germany, left, and Donald Tusk, president of the European Council. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
DONETSK, Ukraine — The main Russian-backed rebel organization in eastern Ukrainesaid it would begin moving heavy weaponry away from the front lines on Sunday, but the government said the group mounted a tank assault on a village near the Sea of Azov.
Violence also spread beyond the separatist regions to other Ukrainian cities on Sunday. In Kharkiv, a major industrial center, a bomb went off during a pro-government march. Three people were killed, including a police officer, and 15 more were wounded, a deputy mayor, Svetlana G. Ruban, said in a telephone interview.
Another bomb was found in a shopping bag on a street in Odessa, the Black Sea port. It was defused by the police.
Both bombs appeared to target ceremonies and parades commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the former pro-Russian government ofUkraine, which was driven out by months of protests on Independence Square in Kiev, the capital.
President Petro O. Poroshenko called the two episodes on Sunday terrorist acts. He spoke at a ceremony in Kiev where thousands of people paraded for the anniversary, including the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Germany and Georgia.
Investigators in Kharkiv, Ukraine, after a bombing killed three people during a pro-government march on Sunday. Sergei Kozlov/European Pressphoto Agency
The Ukrainian authorities say they are struggling to rein in a pro-Moscow underground movement that is growing more active in Kharkiv, Odessa and other cities, mainly in the east, where the population is predominantly Russian speaking. Bombings and assassinations have been frequent.
In Kharkiv, bombs have gone off in a bar frequented by pro-Kiev activists and in a crowd outside a courthouse. Elsewhere, assailants have fired shots at volunteers collecting aid for the Ukrainian Army.
Markian Lubkivskyi, an aide to the director of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the S.B.U., said on Sunday that four suspects were detained in connection with the bombing at the march in Kharkiv. He said they had received weapons and training in Belgorod, a town in Russia near the Ukrainian border.
The marchers in Kharkiv had gathered to walk from the Palace of Sport to Constitution Square, where a ceremony was planned to honor soldiers killed in the fighting with the rebels. The bomb, a fragmentation-type device, was thrown from a passing car.
Photographs posted online of the aftermath of the attack showed wounded people lying on the wet pavement while medical personnel scrambled to help, and a dead body covered with a Ukrainian flag — a sad echo of the former government’s violent crackdown on street protests a year ago.

Ukraine Crisis in Maps

The latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.
In Donetsk, the base of the main rebel organization, the Donetsk People’s Republic, a rebel spokesman said the separatists had begun pulling back their artillery and rocket-launching trucks in accordance with the cease-fire agreement signed in Minsk, Belarus, on Feb. 12. Eduard Basurin, the spokesman for the rebel group, said the withdrawal would be completed by March 7.
Under the agreement, both sides are to withdraw heavy weapons to positions out of range of the front lines, a distance of 15 to 43 miles depending on the particular weapon.
Loud explosions rang through Donetsk early Sunday. Rebel officials said it was a government artillery strike on the city’s outskirts, but the Ukrainian military said it was a rebel barrage into the village of Pisky, just northwest of the city.
Farther south, the Ukrainian military said, rebel tanks assaulted Shyrokyne, a village east of Mariupol near the Azov coast. Mariupol has been on edge for weeks; the port city is widely seen as the rebels’ next major military objective after Debaltseve, the transportation hub between Donetsk and Luhansk that they captured last week.
A Ukrainian military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said government forces in Shyrokyne repulsed the rebel attack early Sunday.
In total, he said, Ukrainian military positions across the conflict zone had come under fire 44 times over the past 24 hours, despite the cease-fire.